


Help Me Remember, Help Me Forget

by Bohemienne



Series: MCU Prompts, Ficlets, and Drabbles [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, angst and softcore smut, inappropriate use of cybernetic arms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-16 23:34:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9294557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bohemienne/pseuds/Bohemienne
Summary: Been a stressful week and I just needed to write something quick. <3





	

**Author's Note:**

> Been a stressful week and I just needed to write something quick. <3

He didn’t expect Steve to want him, but then he didn’t expect this—

This wordless, bloody wanting inside him, this phantom limb, this one happy memory he kept trying to grasp.

At night, when all the other ones crashed down on him, black and tarry and suffocating, the walls and doors between them might as well have been metal bars. He had to break them down, he had to seek Steve out, and his door was never locked and he was never asleep, he must have heard—

Bucky never asked what he heard, never wanted to know. All he wanted was this:

Steve’s arm cradling the back of his head, his lashes damp and his mouth warm. His chest rising up like Bucky was pulling him onto dry land. His hips a hand’s breadth away until Bucky gripped them, pulled them closer, and Steve’s body melted to his like he’d just been waiting, like he really had to ask.

“Buck,” he’d breathe against his ear, and it sounded like a relic brought out for only the faithful to witness. Bucky knew he was no saint, but in the ink of Steve’s bedroom, he could pretend. Every sound he plucked out of Steve was so pure, so beautiful, that it had to be caused by something else, by anything but him. He was a rot, an infection, but these nights reminded him that it didn’t have to spread.

Steve’s skin, firm but yielding as he undressed him—nothing like the metal clamps. His fingers tangled in Bucky’s hair so much gentler than any tube. Bucky’s metal fingers eased him open, and it was muscle memory, it was an instinct, something he could claim that had followed him across decades, across a body broken and replaced. His hands remembered more than just all the ways to wield a gun.

But Steve always held something in, something unspoken in his gaze as the distant city lights danced in his eyes. He would say it, but not now. Not now. Bucky couldn’t let him say it now.

He pressed Steve’s knees up to his chest and drowned himself.

It muffled the ghosts as they moved together. It held back the dawn. Steve’s warmth around him thawed every last stubborn corner of his mind and turned him into mercury. There were no questions, no judgments if he could just make Steve _feel_ , if they could both stop the thorny vines of their thoughts from choking them.

And then finally, finally, the cold seized him and there was nothing but snow and ice and bliss and it was almost as good as going back into the chamber, it could almost wipe away his thoughts the same. He was fallen, he was sprawled out, he was alone. But then the fog receded and Steve was giving him that look, that goddamned look, and he was broken once more and trying to shatter Steve right along with him.

“I love you,” Steve would say, thumb tracing the edge of Bucky’s eyes. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

But in the morning, like everything else, he’d know it for a lie.

**Author's Note:**

> [forever crying about sad grandpas on tumblr](http://starandshield.tumblr.com)


End file.
